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Etymology, History, and Mythology in the Work of Christopher Beckwith Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Frederick Charles Bowman Graduate Program in East Asian Langauges and Literatures The Ohio State University 2011 Thesis Committee: J. Marshall Unger, Advisor Charles J. Quinn, Jr. Copyright 2011 By Frederick Charles Bowman Abstract This thesis concerns the work of Christopher Beckwith, particularly Koguryo: The Language of Japan’s Continental Relatives and Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present. Its argument is that in these two books Beckwith’s principal goal is to present what he refers to as the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex and to provide it with as many members as possible. To this end, it is argued, he makes use of onomastic material relating to the ancient Korean kingdom Koguryŏ from the Samguk sagi, Japanese etymology, and North Iranian ethnic names to create an etymological underpinning between Japan and Koguryŏ, Koguryŏ and the Scythians, and hence of both with the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex. Ultimately, it is asserted, Beckwith’s goal is mythopoeic, having as its end the creation of a consistent Central Eurasian mythology, which he calls the First Story, and its opposition to the characteristics of what he calls the Littoral System and its offspring Modernism, which is in Beckwith’s view responsible for the calamities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A rejection of modernism and rediscovery of our Central Eurasian cultural heritage as expressed in the First Story is proposed as a remedy for our current situation; establishing the broad scope of the First story and the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex is necessary to make this a compelling case, and this establishment is the aim that drives Beckwith’s use of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Indo-European materials. ii Vita May 2003……………………………………..St. John’s Jesuit High School 2007…………………………………………..H.A.B. Xavier University 2009 to present……………………………….MA Student, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State University iii Table of Contents Abstract………………………………………………………………………………ii Vita………………………………………………………………………………….iii Introduction; Puyŏ and Koguryŏ According to Byington……………………………1 Part 1: Koguryŏ, Japan, and the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex……………….7 Part 2: Making sense of the Koguryŏ Foundation Myth……………………………26 Part 3: What does this all mean?................................................................................31 References…………………………………………………………………………..36 iv Introduction; Puyŏ and Koguryŏ according to Byington The subject of this thesis is the Koguryŏ state of Three Kingdoms Korea, documented in Chinese historical sources from the first century BCE, the Puyŏ state, an earlier polity in what is now Manchuria that came into contact with the northeastern state of Yan in the early third century BCE, and how materials related to them, especially the former, are treated in two books by Christopher Beckwith. These books are Koguryo: The Language of Japan's Continental Relatives (2004, second edition 2007) and Empires of the Silk Road (2009). It will be shown that Beckwith, contrary to his statement at the beginning of Empires of the Silk Road that his aim is "to write a realistic, objective view of the history of Central Eurasia and Central Eurasians," has made otherwise directed use of material relating to Koguryŏ in his presentation, the aim of which is to increase the number of adherents to what he refers to as the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex (CECC). This is especially apparent in the realm of etymology, in which Beckwith makes use of an unexplained, seemingly selective Middle Chinese reconstruction referred to as "Archaic Northeastern Middle Chinese" to justify his readings of certain Chinese characters used in the Puyŏ and Koguryŏ foundation myths. These readings are made to resemble words that are taken to have a particular significance within the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex. Ultimately, it will be demonstrated that Beckwith's aim is in essence mythopoeic. Beckwith (2009: xxiii, xxiv) states that his intention is to discredit the received opinion that Central Eurasian peoples such as the Scythians or the Mongols were and are simply 1 "barbarians," which in itself is of course quite unobjectionable. However, there is a second aim concomitant to this first. Namely, this is the establishment of the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex and the opposition of this to the peripheral or Littoral cultures, particularly those of Western Europe, from which emerges what Beckwith calls Modernism, which in addition to the devastation of the peoples of Central Eurasia by colonial powers has given rise to the rejection of all rationality, the degradation of art, and indeed all the ills of modern life. These two entities are seen as combating forces in world history, and in marshaling the forces of the CECC against the Littoral powers, particularities of the history and languages of CECC peoples are frequently overlooked, though this may on the other hand be due to the very broad perspective that Beckwith (2009: viii) states is necessary for his project. Though not in keeping with a realistic, objective history of Central Eurasia and Central Eurasians, Beckwith's opposition of these two warring forces bears a certain similarity to the myths he records in the Prologue to Empires of the Silk Road in which, ultimately, "the unjust overlords who suppressed the righteous people and stole their wealth were finally overthrown, and the men who did the deed were national heroes" (11). This thesis consists of three parts. The first part, containing the core of the thesis, is an assessment of Beckwith's use of etymology and linguistic reconstruction - Japanese, Chinese, and Indo-European sources are all made use of- in Koguryo and Empires of the Silk Road. The second part continues the first, shedding some critical light on Beckwith's presentation by considering Byington's analysis of what the Koguryŏ foundation myth was meant to do and how the Puyŏ and Koguryŏ foundation myths, which Beckwith takes as comprising a unity, are in fact distinct. The third part concludes the thesis, 2 considering Beckwith's aims in making the use he does of his data, whether it concerns Koguryŏ, Japan, or the steppes of Central Eurasia. Before proceeding to Beckwith's work, however, it may be beneficial to briefly introduce Puyŏ, Koguryŏ, and Three Kingdoms Korea to readers unfamiliar with the subject. This is not by any means meant to serve as a comprehensive account, but rather as a short introductory sketch and orientation. Owing to a relative paucity of English sources on the subject and to my own deficiency in reading Chinese and Korean, in which the bulk of the relevant scholarship is written, I am particularly indebted to the work of Mark Edward Byington, especially his 2003 dissertation A History of the Puyŏ State, its History, and its Legacy and the two Early Korea volumes issued by the Early Korea Project at Harvard University with Byington as head editor (Volume 1: Reconsidering Early Korean History Through Archaeology, 2008; Volume 2: The Samhan Period in Korean History, 2009). The history of early Korea is a knotty and sometimes contentious subject. An initial difficulty is presented by the nature of the surviving source material, which is quite patchy and has not infrequently been compiled from earlier works centuries after the events it describes (Byington 2003: 1). Further obviating factors include nationalistic influences on scholars in China and North Korea; Chinese scholarship may claim Puyŏ as an ethnically Chinese state as it lay within the borders of present-day Jilin province (Kang 2008: 23), while North Korean scholars have taken the southernmost settlements of Koguryŏ near present-day Pyongyang to be temporally anterior to that state's more northerly holdings. These southern foundations of Koguryo, labeled the Taedong River Culture, are held to be the cradle not only of Korean but also of human civilization (Kang 3 2008: 24). To facilitate the reader's comprehension of the following pages I have put together a brief sketch of the prominent states of early Korea, making particular use of the work of Mark Edward Byington.1 Puyŏ 夫餘 : This was not a Korean state, but its legacy exerted sufficient influence over subsequent states on the Korean peninsula to merit its treatment in conjunction with them. Puyŏ's origins, according to Byington, are to be found in the Xituanshan archaeological culture of present-day Jilin province, attested from around the 11th century BCE (Byington 2003: 108), whose people came in contact with the northern Chinese state of Yan in the early 3rd century BCE as a result of Yan's eastward expansion into Manchuria and the Korean peninsula (98). Signs of this contact include iron implements of Chinese making and new pottery types (98, 108, 182). Byington contends that this contact with late Warring-States and, later, Han China with its superior technology and more stratified social organization initiated a process of state formation in which the agricultural surplus resultant from newly-introduced iron implemenst, new modes of social organization, and increased economic prosperity resultant from trade combined to form the centralized state of Puyŏ from the people or peoples who made up the Xituanshan culture (182). Of the Puyŏ people themselves, unfortunately, comparatively little is known: who exactly they were, what language they spoke, and so on may forever be lost to history. No historical record written by the Puyŏ people concerning themselves has survived, if ever there were any (9). The only record 1 A satisfactory impression of the historical and archaelogical complexities involved in the study of early Korea cannot here be given, as beyond the scope of the present work and the present capacities of its author.

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